Professor Chris Pascal

Professor Chris Pascal is Honorary Director of the Centre for Research in Early Childhood in Birmingham, a charity located in a Children's Centre in Birmingham. She is Honorary Professor at Birmingham City University and the University of Wolverhampton and Honorary Senior Research Fellow at the University of Birmingham. Chris has led a number of national and international large-scale research projects, including the Effective Early Learning Programme, the Accounting Early for Life Long Learning Programme and the Children Crossing Borders Project. She also contributed to the OECD's Review ‘Starting Strong'. She is strongly committed to making research applicable to practice and policy and ensuring that early childhood provision meets the needs of all children and families, and especially the least advantaged. She has served as Ministerial adviser to the UK Government and Specialist Adviser to the UK House of Commons Select Committee on Education. She was awarded the OBE in 2001 for her services to early year's education. She was a founder Trustee of EECERA and joint chair of the Second EECERA Conference in England in 1992. She was Coordinating Editor of the EECER Journal from 1993-2008 and was appointed President of EECERA in 2008.

Maelis Karlsson Lohmander

Maelis Karlsson Lohmander is a Senior Lecturer at the Dept of Education, Communication and Learning at the University of Gothenburg, Sweden. In 2010 Maelis chaired the Scientific committee of the OMEP conference and has been an active member of the EECERA Board of Trustees since its inception. She was Chair of the Fourth EECERA Conference in Sweden in 1994 and since 2005 has been Vice President of EECERA, most recently being re-elected in 2011

Professor Tony Bertram

Professor Tony Bertram is Honorary Director of the Centre for Research in Early Childhood in Birmingham, a charity located in an inner city children's centre and is also a Director of Amber Publications and Training (APT), which has delivered training to early years' practitioners in more than 75 local authorities across the UK. He is Honorary Professor at Birmingham City University and Wolverhampton University and is Honorary Senior Research Fellow at the University of Birmingham. Tony has been a Ministerial Adviser to the UK Government, he has been a visiting scholar in Queensland and Qatar and has advised policy makers in Egypt, Ireland, Portugal, Maryland and Australia. He has published widely in the field and has contributed to many international studies including INCA, OECD Starting Strong and the Children Crossing Borders project. He is strongly committed to making research applicable to practice and policy and together with other members of the CREC team designed several self-evaluation, quality assurance programmes, EEL, BEEL and AcE that are used extensively in the UK. He was a founder Trustee of EECERA, joint Chair of the Second EECERA Conference in England in 1992 and its first President from 1993 until 2005. He was re-elected to the Board in 2006, and since 2008, he has been Coordinating Editor of EECER Journal. In 2010 Tony chaired the 20th annual EECERA conference in Birmingham.

John Bennett, M.Ed. Ph.D.

Head of the Early Childhood and Family Unit at UNESCO from 1989-97, Dr. John Bennett has worked in the early childhood policy field with the main international early childhood organisations, and with the UN Committee on the Rights of the Child and the UN Committee for the International Year of the Family. In 1998, he joined the OECD as senior consultant to the Early Childhood Policy Review, where he co-authored with Dr. Michelle Neuman and Professor Collette Tayler two comparative works on early childhood policy in twenty of the OECD countries. The reports entitled Starting Strong: early childhood education and care were published by the OECD in 2001 and 2006.

Author of many articles, including contributions to the International Encyclopaedia of Education and the Encyclopaedia of the Social and Behavioural Sciences, John is a member of several international juries and committees in the field of early education and children's rights. He is also a contributing editor to the Early Childhood Development Encyclopaedia (Centre of Excellence for Early Childhood Development, Montreal). At present, a Visiting Fellow at the Thomas Coram Research Unit, Institute of Education, University of London, he is engaged in researching early childhood policies for Roma children in the Central and South-Eastern European countries for OSI, UNICEF and the Roma Education Fund. John was elected to the Board of Trustees in 2009.

Professor Júlia Formosinho

Professor Júlia Formosinho is a Professor at the University of Minho in Braga., Portugal and co-founder and Joint Director of Research at the Childhood Association (Associação Criança), a civic network which promotes a socio-cultural-constructivist approach to the education of children and teachers, intercultural understanding and advocacy of children's rights in early childhood settings. The Childhood Association has been supported by a grant from the Aga Khan and Gulbenkian Foundations. One of the achievements of this civic network has been the development of a pedagogical approach to children and adult learning called Pedagogy-in-Participation. Since 1996, she has been the editor of a series for the leading educational publishing house in Portugal and African Portuguese speaking countries - Porto Editora - called Childhood Series. The two last published books were: one on praxiological research and another on young children' voices about their schools In the last two years she has been coordinating a national project on the reconstruction of meaning and the development of quality in early childhood education settings through a deep dialogue with Chris Pascal and Tony Bertram about an approach to educational change. Recently Júlia has been invited by a consortium of institutions, including the Professional Association of Early Childhood Teachers, to develop a national research project on crèches (0 to 3 years) in order to create advocacy for a better education of babies and support for families. Júlia was Chair of the Sixth EECERA Conference in Portugal in 1996. Júlia sits on EECERA's ethics committee and supports the development of Special Themed Editions of the EECERJ. Júlia has a long standing collaboration with Spanish universities and professional associations, namely with the University of Santiago de Compostela and has published with Spanish colleagues and with Brazilian colleagues (in São Paulo, Ceará, Minas Gerais) resulting in the publication of two books in Brazil, chapters in several books and articles in research journals. Júlia has served on the Board since its inception and was re-elected as a Trustee by the Electoral College in 2009.

Dr Margy Whalley

Dr Margy Whalley is Director of Research, Development and Training at Pen Green Research Base in Corby, UK. She is an early years' educator, having operationally led multi-disciplinary, multi-functional early year's services in the UK, Brazil and Papua New Guinea. She was a founder head of Pen Green Children's Centre and has worked there since 1983. As a fully integrated service for children and families, Pen Green became the prototype for the UK Government's Early Excellence, Sure Start and Children Centre Programmes. She is committed to engaging in practitioner research and established the Research Base at Pen Green 13 years ago. It is currently the only Early Years Research Base in the UK that has grown out of practitioner's researching their own practice. At the Research Base she has led the development of a comprehensive programme of initial and post qualifying training to become the "University of the Workplace" in Corby, working in collaboration with the University of Leicester, the University of Hertfordshire and the University of Middlesex. She led the national project for designing, writing and developing the UK National Qualification in Leadership – the NPQICL (The National Professional Qualification Integrated Centre Leadership). As a research base Pen Green continues to influence policy and development at a national, regional and local level. In 2008, Margy received the Childcare Lifetime Achievement Award, in honour of her outstanding contribution to the Childcare Development, over the past 35 years.

Margy was elected as an EECERA Trustee in 2006 and re-elected for a second term in 2009.

Elly Singer

Elly is Associate professor at both University Utrecht (developmental psychology) and University of Amsterdam (educational sciences)

She is a member of the editorial board of EECERJ and started, with Bert van Oers and Marttta Hännikäinen, the SIG on Rethinking Play

In the Netherlands Elly was the project leader on the construction of the Dutch Pedagogical Framework for child centers for 0-4-year olds and was, and is still, involved in Dutch committees and advisory boards in the field of early childhood education and care. Recently, in the Netherlands, she has been working to set up a (non-subsidized) network of action research in which pedagogues, students and academic researchers work together to gain insight into shared issues.

Elly was elected to the Board of Trustees in 2011.

Michel Vandenbroeck

Michel entered the early childhood field in 1986, as a collaborator of VBJK (the Research and Resource Centre for Early Childhood Care and Education in Flanders, Belgium), where he has since worked for some twenty years.

In 2006, he joined the Department of Social Welfare Studies (faculty of Psychology and Educational Sciences) at Ghent University, and became Professor in 2009, whilst still serving as president of the board of VBJK. This has allowed Michel allows me to combine teaching, research and a continuous involvement with the field of ECEC in Flanders and internationally.

Michel has also been involved in the DECET network and the Belgian section of OMEP, has made contributions to had collaborations with "Children in Europe", has had active collaboration with the network "Reconceptualizing Early Childhood Education" as well as the French group "Nouveaux paradigms pour repenser l'éducation préscolaire", has co-chaired a learning group on program development in contexts of ethnic division, as a part of the "Joint Learning Initiative on Children and Ethnic Diversity", and has been active member of the EECERJ editorial Board for many years.

Michel was elected to the Board of Trustees in 2011.